Embodiments of this invention relate to network communications. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to versatile architectures, arrangements, systems and/or methods for an Internet protocol telephone system for enterprise applications that are easily provisioned and maintained.
Telecommunication networks traditionally utilize the SS7 global standard to define the procedures and protocol by which digital signaling network elements exchange information. More specifically, SS7 is a digital signaling network that is used to effect wireless and wireline call setup, routing and control and is often referred to as the public switched telephone network or PSTN. Although the vast majority of telephony services are currently provided over the PSTN, there has been a recent shift toward use of internet protocol (IP) networks for transmission of voice and multimedia.
IP telephony, also known as voice over Internet protocol or VoIP, is a technology that allows telephone conversations to be made across the Internet rather than exclusively over regular PSTN phone lines. Indeed, IP networks are being rapidly adopted by large enterprises to replace telephony systems that rely solely on the PSTN.
A large enterprise can have thousands of employees located throughout the world, each of who must have access to the enterprise's corporate internal telephony system. In other business settings, an office park may host several hundred smaller enterprises, each of which has several telephony devices.
Because IP telephony solutions bypass the toll-based feature of the PSTN, enterprises reap considerable cost savings by switching to IP-centric telephony systems. However, many enterprises find that it is difficult to provision and manage a large, multi-sited deployment. The task of provisioning and managing thousands of telephony devices is complex and expensive because of the multiple sites and the sheer number of telephony devices that must be supported. To support large deployments, vendors of IP-centric telephony systems must provide enterprises with a managed service that supports multiple sites with a full-feature service offering, such as connectivity between sites so that users may use a short form dialing between sites, that users have come to expect from the legacy PSTN system. Further, the IP telephony system must comply with regulatory environment such as providing contact information to emergency personnel, line tapping and the like. Unfortunately, when deployed on a global scale, such service offerings are not easily implemented and are difficult to manage on an on-going basis.
The difficulty only increases when mobile users are considered. For example, it is common for employees to work at many different locations within a site or to travel between sites so that regardless of where they are located, their telephone service needs to follow. There is also a need to extend the benefits of an IP telephony network to smaller enterprises that only have a few telephony devices. Unfortunately, in a typical implementation of an IP telephony solution, each site must have its own network interface equipment to handle the call processing function. This 1:1 relationship is expensive because it does not allow segmentation between customers and because most customers cannot justify the cost of an enterprise level IP telephony solution. Notwithstanding the cost, there is great demand for a hosted IP network that can be deployed at business parks or by service providers who wish to offer telephony products to smaller enterprise subscribers. However, it is also difficult to segment the IP network access so that multiple smaller enterprises may share common network interface equipment. Clearly, there is a need to provide an IP telephony system that is adaptable to unique provisioning and management needs of both the large and small enterprise.
Users sometimes assume that IP telephony devices include features such as caller identification where the caller's name and address are transmitted along with the call to other users or to emergency operator. However, IP telephony systems depend on the Internet provider to transfer the call from the IP network to the SS7 emergency network, which is often error prone and unreliable. Clearly, defining broad new categories of services that straddle the intersection of computers and phones is a challenging task, especially so at the enterprise level. To illustrate, if an enterprise has thirty thousand employees located around the world who use the enterprise's IP telephony network, the IP telephony system must be robust enough to provision and manage the user's needs regardless of the site where they are located.
Unfortunately, the ability to provide many IP telephony services is directly impacted by the need to interface the IP telephony device with the PSTN while providing the features of an enterprise class phone system. The PSTN currently relies on a numbering plan commonly referred to as the E.164 numbering plan. This plan allocates numbers to devices such as wireline telephones, facsimile machines, cellular or wireless phones and other devices that connect to the PSTN. Thus, even though more and more enterprises and individuals will transition their telephony services from PSTN to the IP network in the future, for the foreseeable future, the need to interface the IP network with the PSTN remains. For this reason IP network devices often require an E.164 number to be associated with the IP telephony devices. Because of the need to correlate the IP network device number to its E.164 number, provisioning an IP voice network for IP telephony is challenging and is limited by the typical constraints imposed by the E.164 numbering system. This correlation requirement increases costs and results in a complex administrative challenge to set up and maintain.
It is readily acknowledged that telephony service providers must increasingly depend on managed IP telephony to remain competitive. Typical of the problems with managing the IP telephony network of an enterprise arises when employees float from location to location. What is needed is a system that can maintain an association between an employee's phone and the location where they logged in so that their phone preferences will follow them to the new location. What is also needed is a system that adapts to local regulation in terms of identifying the location of the employee when they make an emergency call.
Accordingly, what is needed is a carrier-class and scalable IP telephony system that may be deployed at multiple locations throughout the world that can readily adapt to the provisioning needs of various enterprises. What is further needed is a system that can provide enterprise-level telephony services to a large number of smaller enterprises at an affordable and cost-effective price point. Further, what is needed is an IP telephony system that supports the provisioning and management. Further still, what is needed is an IP telephony system that provides the standard public safety and business features that are typically provided by the traditional SS7 telephony network regardless of where the user is located.